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" There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns. "

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" Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me. "

Sheila Heti

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" Writing plays, I've always felt a little like I'm guessing - less sure of what's good and what's not good. I think that's because it's not a complete work of art. "

" To me, something that's beautiful in terms of a book is something that lives inside the reader both as a discrete and complete thing, but also something that seeps out into their life and thoughts. "

" In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home. "

" I've written about women's lives, and I just want to write about them from being a woman. I don't need feminism on top of that when I'm writing. "

" Everyone has to put clothes on in the morning, and it's interesting to see how much people's personal histories come into that decision. "

" If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies. "

" In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear. "

" As a journalist, you don't tend to interview people with a view to becoming their friend. You can't expect that. It's not professional. "

" I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live. "

" I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing. "

" I wished to have the time to put together a world view, but there was never enough time, and also, those who had it seemed to have had it from a very young age; they didn't begin at forty. "

" People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to. "

" I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person. "

" I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other, developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They're intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly like normal friendships. "

" Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows. "

" There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make? "

" Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age. "

" Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture. "

" An artist's love for what they create is what creates love. "

" Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious: make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. "

" Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what's modern is that it's considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this. "

" You think you're writing the most important book, you think you're writing the most stupid book, and you never really know before it's done that it's going to be done. "

" There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear. "

" Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances! "

" I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration. "

" Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others. "

" Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl. "

" Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors. "

" Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. "